The late Anglican theologian J. I. Packer often recounted the story of being asked to serve as junior librarian at the student Inter-Collegiate Christian Union. Packer was then a nineteen-year-old Oxford undergraduate, and had been a Christian for only about a year. He was just then particularly discouraged by his sin-struggles and stalled growth, a condition aggravated by the triumphant brand of Christian life teaching he had received. So it was that Packer found himself processing some of the library’s recent donations in a dusty basement. As he perused the stacks, Packer came across an uncut set of the works of the old Puritan minister John Owen. The titles printed on the spine of volume 6—On Indwelling Sin in Believers and On the Mortification of Sin in Believers—piqued his interest. Packer cut the 300-year-old pages, and discovered a message of sanctification he found eminently biblical, realistic, hopeful, and life-giving. He was never the same.

Church history can often surprise you like that. It offers us no infallible guide for faith and practice—we have our Bibles for that—but the history of the church does extend to us a wonderful invitation. It beckons us into a company of fellow believers who have loved, listened to, and lived out the same precious Word of God in their own times. As we enter this fellowship, we too can find life-giving help for reading our Bibles and following Jesus more faithfully in our own time. As I consider how the study of church history aids our discipleship, three benefits immediately come to mind.

Interpretation

“My conscience is captive to the Word of God,” declared Martin Luther famously. The Bible alone is our ultimate authority in the Christian life, as Luther and his fellow Reformers repeatedly remind us. Yet the people of God in times past also serve as invaluable partners for interpreting and applying the Scriptures in our lives today.

For instance, when the fourth century church experienced confusion regarding the person of Christ, Athanasius searched the Scriptures and courageously declared that that Jesus the Son is “very God of very God.” Not long afterward, Augustine entered debate with Pelagius; he corrected the works-righteousness reflex in all of our hearts, insisting that we are saved by grace alone. From the eleventh century, Anselm helps us grasp why God became a man, the only mediator sufficient to pay our sin-debt before a holy God. In the sixteenth century, Luther not only proclaimed justification by faith to our anxious hearts, but called us to serve God in all of life by unearthing the Bible’s doctrine of vocation. I draw from these and other faithful interpreters constantly when I read my Bible today.

As you and I read and teach the Scriptures, we do so at the end of a long line of brothers and sisters who labored to preserve, defend, understand, proclaim, and live this same book. We benefit immeasurably from their labors! Like J. I. Packer, where would I be without the Puritans’ deep wrestling with the doctrine of sanctification? Or George Whitefield’s white-hot focus on the necessity of the new birth? Or Jonathan Edwards’s painstaking analysis of true revival? Every time I explain to my church the importance of being “filled with the Spirit” from Ephesians 5:18, I think of how Adrian Rogers brought that truth to life for me in a particular sermon from the mid-1980s. And so on.

Studying church history helps us interpret our Bibles. No, the Christians of the past did not always get their interpretations right. I want to pass over Augustine’s ecclesiology even as a I celebrate much of his soteriology, for instance. And many a saint from the past could use a good Pauline scrub of his or her ascetic bend of mind. But if, by God’s grace, we can sometimes see further or see certain issues more clearly than they did, it is because we are standing on the shoulders of these giants.

Imitation

We not only need help in understanding what our Bibles teach us; we need flesh-and-blood models for how put that teaching into practice. Scripture itself tells us this: “Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us,” Paul writes (Phil 3:17). “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith (Heb 13:7).” We need models in the Christian life! Church History provides us with a multitude of brothers and sisters from across the ages, who believed these promises, obeyed these commands, and played their own part in this grand story.

I think, for example, about the courageous, reforming labors of the Scot John Knox, who often said that “one man with God is a majority.” I have often found encouragement in the cheerful pastoral endurance of the Anglican Charles Simeon, who overcame years of painful resistance to his ministry at Christ Church, and remained there for 54 faithful years. When I feel overwhelmed by the load of my responsibilities, I remember the words of William Carey, the father of modern missions: “I can plod. I can persevere in any definite pursuit. To this I owe everything.” Who could fail to be moved by the beautiful Christian witness of Corrie Ten Boom, the evangelistic zeal of John Leland or Peter Cartwright, or George Muller’s childlike trust in a promise-keeping God? We can keep our eyes on men and women like this, because they kept their eyes on Christ and his Word.

Then again, sometimes their gaze drifted. Watch these historical models for very long, and you will quickly discover that they are no stained-glass saints, but men and women “with a nature like ours (James 5:17),” who provide ample empirical evidence of the doctrines of total depravity and indwelling sin. The very best of God’s people were subject to puzzling inconsistencies, silly pettiness, appalling blind spots, disappointing compromises, and all-out corruption. But as Paul reminds, these, too, offer vital instruction. “Now these things took place as examples for us,” he writes of our fallen Israelite forbears, “that we might not desire evil as they did (1 Cor 10:6).” We have much to learn from the slips, wanderings, and rebellions of our faith family.

Instead of growing despondent over the negative examples of church history, we should receive them as God’s gracious warnings to us. “Therefore let any anyone who thinks that he stands take heed, lest he fall (1 Cor 10:12).” The less flattering episodes of the Christian story should humble us. If they are capable of sin, then so am I. If they got it so wrong in their day, what could I be getting so wrong in mine? We can also take a certain encouragement in learning that there has never been a perfect church, or pristine servants: the Lord Jesus has never required flawless materials to do his work.

Inspiration

We need the history of the church for inspiration. “Since therefore we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses,” declares the author of Hebrews, “let us run with endurance the race that is set before us (Heb 12:1).” This Christian life is an endurance race: long, strenuous, and requiring continuous faith in the unseen God who has called us. Sometimes it takes all that we have just to keep going. But we are not the first to run this ultramarathon. Countless men and women across the ages also heard the call of Jesus and entered this race of faith. Their circumstances and challenges were different from ours, but they clung to the same promises of the same faithful God, mile after weary mile, until he got them home. Now in glory, these saints surround us as “witnesses,” testifying that Jesus is worthy of every single step.

If history inspires us with the stories of individual believers, it also lifts our gaze higher, to the sovereign God these disciples served. The story of the church reminds us that the same God who speaks to us in the Scriptures has continued to act in history, keeping his promises, preserving his people, and expanding the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. Church history encourages us with the same message God gave to Daniel: that earthly empires rise and fall, but the Son of Man has been given all power, and his saints keep marching on (Dan 7:1–28). Jesus has never stopped building his church, and the gates of hell cannot prevail against it (Matt 16:18). Indeed, our God is redeeming for himself a multitude greater than any man can number, a people of every nation, tribe, and tongue (Rev 7:9–10). This is true even when the story seems at its darkest; as G. K. Chesterton put it, “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”

The people who know a God like this can endure just about anything, with hearts full of hope. I think of Thomas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, tied to the stake in Oxford’s Broad Street in 1555 for their support of Protestant reforms in England. As the torch was being lit, Latimer purportedly remarked, “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall we shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as shall never be put out.” This is the confidence that comes from knowing the Lord of history. It makes you expect great things and attempt great things in Jesus’ name. It puts a song in the mouths of martyrs, steel in the spines of reformers, and laughter in the hearts of all God’s children. God is faithful to that big story he is directing, and to all the little people within it.

Conclusion

I often think back to that fateful day when young J. I. Packer blew the dust off John Owen’s works like some Josiah, rediscovering the scroll of Deuteronomy. The story is personal for me, because some sixty years after Packer met Owen, I met Packer. I was also a spiritually discouraged college student, full of my own sin and confusion. But in the mercy of God, I got hold of Packer’s Quest for Godliness, and stumbled into that same faith-bolstering Puritan theology that he had discovered decades before. Like Packer, I have never been the same. Church history can surprise you like that. Why not come and see for yourself? “Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations (Deut 32:7).”